Page:Some soldier poets.djvu/138

Rh 120 lines of blank verse in English. I will read one of his successful lyrics instead.

Browning imagines a page-boy in love with a queen, and, while tending her hounds and hawks, complaining of this hopeless passion and overheard by her.

The turn of rhythm on "when—where—how" is so felicitous that it seems madness for a poet to dream of adding another stanza which, as coming second, should be more perfect.

Yet when we read—

we breathe free, and glory in his triumph.

Yet this song is not in the Oxford Book of English Verse, where under Browning's name several obviously inferior things appear. 134